


Singularity

by rioseco



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, False Memories, Gen, Identity Issues, Introspection, Mentions of Canonical Character Deaths, Minor Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Pining, Riku Replica-Centric, Spans the end of COM to KH3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 10:10:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18826543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rioseco/pseuds/rioseco
Summary: He could try to hide his skeletons in the closet, bury the replica deep into the recesses of his heart and six feet under dirty foul earth, but the replica -- oh, even as the replica felt his mind splinter and disintegrate under the cruel harsh vapors of the darkness, even as he felt each chain of fake memory snap one by one… even then, he unequivocally knew: he was different.I’m me.





	Singularity

**Author's Note:**

> _If my voice isn’t real, if I shouldn’t have thrown myself away, if even this pain isn’t real…. What was I supposed to do back then?_  
>  \- [Singularity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8npDG2ulKQ)

 In the end, the replica had not been enough.

_Figures_. All he’d ever amounted to becoming was a mess of shabbily hewn together flashes of a life he’d never lived, strung up by plastic sinew in a thick slab of inorganic meat.

Even the jealousies, the savage selfishness that seared inside of the replica were nothing more than paltry mimicries. The indignance burbling in his veins... The desperate longing to prove himself worthy to all of the jeering faces around him… Those very same emotions had been burned so deeply into the original’s heart from a life actually lived that what the replica merely  _imagined_  he was feeling could never truly be real.

In the end, to die by the original’s hands had been the only fitting end to his meager, meaningless existence.

 

_So what if I lost_ , he’d hissed.  _So. What_.

The replica could feel how much the original reviled himself, how much the original tried to quash down the inadequacies - but he could never lie to a copy of his own heart.

That's why the replica knew. In a way, the original must have thrilled in the replica's last moments: killing the very likeness of what he so deeply hated. Pretending that killing the replica would absolve him of all of his guilt and past failures. As if the replica could stand for what the original had been.

 

But the original was wrong.

He could try to hide his skeletons in the closet, bury the replica deep into the recesses of his heart and six feet under dirty foul earth, but the replica -- oh, even as the replica felt his mind splinter and disintegrate under the cruel harsh vapors of the darkness, even as he felt each chain of fake memory snap one by one… even then, he unequivocally knew: he was different.

_I’m me._

_I’m me, I’m me, I’m_ ** _me_**   _and nobody else. I’m not you. I’m not those sun-drenched memories, flashes of heavy balsa wood and pale frayed ropes, the smell of salt on ocean breezes, those kind smiling faces and friends I’d never actually met. Millions of snapshots of laughter and happiness I never actually felt. I never fell to darkness like you, betrayed (my friends) like you, destroyed (my family, my home) like you. I never --_

He grasps for frayed threads of personhood as the bright flashes of stolen memories blind him. What had he even  _been_  before the original consumed him? What could the replica even cling to as a vestige of himself?

 

_I’m... me?_

_What is ‘me’ without you?  
_

 

He tries to latch onto anything that might be his and his alone, but the chains are brittle and plastic - nothing like the warm genuine memories that have been implanted in his little puppet heart - and he’s left with nothing but the cracking remnants of an unlived life -

 

_Snap_.

A plastic chain breaks, and he remembers: a small child crying in fear, starlight streaking across the sky, youthful face (masked by shadows and changed around) --  _but who—?_

_snap_  -

he remembers then forgets the way he (hadn’t) proudly buffed away the snags of splinters from the two wooden swords, cheeks warm at her quiet words of praise -

_snap_  -

he remembers as the thought drifts into his mind like a passing cloud: watching tenderly as the girl hummed, high and sweet like a songbird, her white fingertips daubed with all the colors of the rainbow. Her hair gilded in the pale sunlight.

_snap -_

...The brittle plastic chains snag on the edges of his mind, begging for the right to stay.

Yet the only true thing he can remember beyond the imprinted memories is this: Violence. Anger. Desperation coursing through his veins, demanding that someone - anyone - see him as he is instead of just the face he’s been made to wear.

 

He remembers:

“ _Wouldn’t you like to be real_?” the man had crooned, voice silky and beguiling.

More than  _anything_. More than the replica could even stand. He should have recognized how much the viper had sounded like the cruel whispers of Maleficent, regaling him with words of power and dangling promises of strength - promises that this strength,  _this time_ , might even be enough to make him worthy.

“ _All you need is the kind of power that the real Riku doesn’t have,_ “ His lips curled, thin, eyes glinting manic like a knife's edge.

 

And cruelly, here, alas,  _here,_  the chain of memories holds strong.

 

As he sinks deeper, the replica wonders why it has to be that only the sweetest memories are the ones that snap and crumble under the weight of his existence. He may have no interest in entertaining delusions, but… why must it be that the memory of a man’s heavy pulse throbbing erratic, frenzied,  _terrified —_  then stilling into nothing but cold dead flesh under his angry red grip is all that really remains.

 

…Is that it? These are the only flashes of memories he gets to cling to, to define himself as anything other than the original?

 

No.

No. That can’t be right. The foul corrosive darkness eats away at the body that was never his body, the face that he only ever copied, but his heart cries like a scared child,  _I’m me I’m me I’m me and I’m more than what they turned me into - I just... I just wanted to be --_

_real._

 

He’s being devoured now. He can feel it. His tenuous grasp on consciousness flickers dully into the void, and all he hears now is the quiet lap of water in a large and empty chamber. He closes his eyes, too frightened to look at where he will end up because if the replica really is the replica and none of the kinder, gentler parts of the original, then the only thing the replica is… the only thing the replica had ever amounted to in his brief moment of existence had been -

a murderer.

 

* * *

The replica is reborn.

 

He awakens not to a dazzling, fascinating new world nor does he wake with his pale fake body slick with residual chemical preservatives, as he had the night he had been activated. No, this time, he wakes lying in an expanse of stale shadowy water, stretching as far as his eyes can see. He's in a dim chamber and he knows even before he feels the steady, heavy heartbeat: he’s inside of the original's heart.

_So this is what you are._  He thinks, letting the inky water cradle his body like a cold barren womb.  _You are you, and I am me_.

He skims his hand along the water's edge, dancing his fingertips along the surface and rippling the darkness inside of the original's heart.  _Can you feel me? Do you know I'm in here?_

The original's heart rumbles, and as the days go on, dusky thick water steadily pours into the chamber as if the replica is trapped inside of a leaky sinking ship. His new home steadily spreads, a vast unending gloomy ocean.

Suspended in the original's hollow heart, the replica loses track of the passage of time. There is little in the way of light or sound here - just the strange ancient echo of the gentle sound of water and tiny snatches of conversations that bounce off the high chambers of this heart, fleeting hallucinations of people that the replica does not know and will never get to know. 

There are ghosts here: ghosts of voices, ghosts of people, memories that flash like dull starlight in the original’s heart and he sometimes recognizes a face or a voice from the memories he has stolen. It becomes a game for the replica: when the original’s heart allows him a glimpse, can the replica put a name to a voice? A name to an already-vanishing face?  


 

And one day, he hears a voice that had only ever registered in the past as a low water-logged murmur.

' _...memories are missing-'_  the voice suddenly stammers, as sweet and tragic as a canary. The words echo quietly - ' _missing_ '

'- _issing_ ' 

'- _sing'_

and the replica can  _feel_  the heart lurch and twist, a cold draft sweeping around him - and he remembers this emotion from when the original had first appeared to strike him down: it's fear.

Grey mirages flicker and stutter before the replica's eyes, more like afterimages that dissolve before he can truly see what he is witnessing - but in that moment, there is one phantom he catches clearly. It's a vision burned deep into the original's heart and the replica has seen far too often to forget now. It is this: the hero, motionless, suspended lifeless in a far too familiar glass pod.

The waters tremble around him, afraid.

 

 

Then the canary whispers again - '- _even longer before Sora can wake up ...'_ and a tight knot of something thick and painful stirs inside of the replica -- but  _why_? The voice, the sorrow, the regret - why does it sound so familiar? He feels something snag.

 

_-'m sorry'_  

A smile? 

 

' _sorry-'_

A shower of starlight?

 

_'sorry'_   

A glass-cut, five-pointed star?

 

The sweet susurrations ring over and over and over in the great cold chamber, like a lingering ghost and --

all of a sudden, the replica wants to cry.  


 

Oh.

 

How could he forget the only one from the chain of his memories that had begged to stay, despite knowing it had no right to exist in his mind?  The replica has never spoken a word in the original's heart before, but in a creaky, tired voice, ' _Naminé_ ' slips from his lips like a prayer.  Her name and her apology echo over and over in the hollow, dark chamber of the original's heart, and like a child, the replica begs the sound to stay.

* * *

 

Eventually, the replica grows terrified that he will drown inside the rising waters of the original's heart. 

A foul, harsh rain pelts down into the chamber like a storm violent enough to fell whole islands and worlds, and though the replica  _knows_  he does not deserve the shame associated with that half-formed memory, it still wakens a primal fear in him. The scent of the water grows sharp and angry. This is a calamity, a torrential downpour, and the replica does not know what is happening with the original that has brought forth such fury and resignation, but it does not matter to the replica - not really.

The darkness wastes away at his form, acidic and harsh, crashing over his head and it is all he can do to hold his breath as he lets the darkness take him over.  


 

In his last moment of lucidity, the replica thinks suddenly of Naminé's voice and her apology. And the last thing he sees is the hazy afterimage of a strange boy cloaked in black with eyes as haunted and terrible as the flooding in the original's heart.

The replica does not know the boy, but he's seen those deep pools of sorrow before. Did the replica look just as angry and desperate when he too fought for his right to exist? Does the original see flashes of the replica in that boy he's fighting now?

Does he know they share the same waters? The same unjust sorrow?

 

When the replica succumbs, her name flutters out - a futile cry into the void. He suspects, he will not ever stir again.

**Author's Note:**

> (this probably should have been a one-shot, but i just need a break from the sad feels writing/editing this fic gives me ;-;)


End file.
